unit9-Housingcrisisgoessuburban-含翻译-住房危机蔓延到郊区_

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2024年4月27日发(作者：)

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In the past five years, housing prices in Fairfax County, Virginia have grown 12

times as fast as household incomes. Today, the county’s average family would have to

spend 54% of its income to afford the county‘s average home; in 2000, the figure was

26%. The situation is so dire that Fairfax recently began offering housing subsidies to

families earning $90,000 a year; soon, that figure may go as high as $110,000 a year.

THE HOUSING CRISIS GOES SUBURBAN

Michael Grunwald

1. Seventy years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the Depression

had left one-third of the American people "ill-housed, ill-clothed and ill-nourished,"

Americans are well-clothed and increasingly over nourished. But the scarcity of

affordable housing is a deepening national crisis, and not just for inner-city families

on welfare. The problem has climbed the income ladder and moved to the suburbs,

where service workers cram their families into overcrowded apartments, college

graduates have to crash with their parents, and firefighters, police officers and

teachers can't afford to live in the communities they serve.

2. Home ownership is near an all-time high, but the gap is growing between the Owns

and the Own-Nots —as well as the Owns and the Own-80-Miles-From-Work.

One-third of Americans now spend at least 30% of their income on housing, the

federal definition of an "unaffordable" burden, and half the working poor spend at

least 50% of their income on rent, a "critical" burden. The real estate boom of the past

decade has produced windfalls for Americans who owned before it began, but

affordable housing is now a serious problem for more low- and moderate-income

Americans than taxes, Social Security or gas prices.

a used to care a lot about affordable housing. Roosevelt signed housing

legislation in 1934 and 1937, providing mortgages, government apartments and

construction jobs for workers down on their luck. In 1949, Congress .set an official

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goal of "a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,"

and in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon began offering subsidized rent vouchers to

millions of low-income tenants in private housing. For half a century, most housing

debates in Washington revolved around how much to expand federal assistance.

4. But for the past two decades, the only new federal housing initiative has been

HOPE VI5, a Clinton administration program that has demolished 80,000 units of the

worst public housing and built mixed-income developments in their place. The

program has eliminated most of the high-rise hellholes that gave public housing a bad

name and has revived some urban neighborhoods. But it has razed more subsidized

apartments than it has replaced.

5. Overall, the number of households receiving federal aid has flatlined since the early

1990s, despite an expanding population and a ballooning budget. Congress has

rejected most of President Bush's proposed cuts, but there has been virtually no

discussion of increases; affordable-housing advocates spend most of their time

fighting to preserve the status quo.

6. And it's a tough status quo. Today, for every one of the 4.5 million low-income

families that receive federal housing assistance, there are three eligible families

without it. Fairfax County has 12,000 families on a waiting list for 4,000 assisted

apartments. "It's golden when you get one—nobody wants to give it up," says Conrad

Egan, chairman of the Fairfax housing authority. It sounds odd, but the victims of

today's housing crisis are not people living in "the projects", but people who aren't

even that lucky.

7. Some liberals dream of extending subsidies to all eligible low-income families, but

that $100 billion-a-year solution was unrealistic even before the budget deficit

ballooned again. So even some housing advocates now support time limits on most

federal rent aid. The time limits included in welfare reform 10 years ago were

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